52 SHOW TIME! ! $320 buys 13 nights of night-life . In Amsterdam, London, Paris. The days are almost free We call this our "Broadway of Europe" Tour It includes tickets to 6 English plays or musicals, including the famed Mermaid Theatre. A performance at the famous Concertgebouw. It includes a night over an Indonesian dinner. A lively Dutch night- club night. A night in English pubs. A Pari- sian cabaret night. And two nights on your own. And more! The nights in the Dutch, English and French hotels, each with wonderful, typi- cal atmosphere-ALL WITH BATH-are in- cluded, too. And breakfast every morning. All transfers are included from the airports, not the city air terminals. Oh, yes, the days -we offer free sightseeing tours, too. And more! The land arrangements cost $70 - and there are 70 services available. 70 for $70. Add $260 for the round-trip Jet flight New Y ork/ Amsterdam. That's $320. * For a complete program of the 70 serv- ices, send in the coupon, ask your travel agent, or call us, Lufthansa. *Sased on 14-21 day, 15 passenger, 81T Economy Fare from NYC when applicable 1------------ 1 I Lufthansa German Airlines 5-727 I I 410 Park Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10022 I I Dear Lufthansa: I'm ready for a little I I night-life. Please send your Broadway I Tour of Europe folder to: I I I Name I I I I Address I I I I City State I I I I Zip Phone I I I I My Travel Agent IS I I 8 Lufthansa: L----________--1 \ / "I' -- , \ I i) / \ f, I / Nichols at least whispered it in Dustin Hofflnan's ear, and, without very much extra effort, could have tipped off the audience. If Benjamin is a vir- gin, we may chalk up most of his ter- rible distress to first-time jitters. (Many of the critics made exactly this assump- tion, and consequently took Benjamin's sexual initiation, or "coming of age," to be the major theme of the film.) If he is not, we must look for more interest- ing and disturbing causes. Having read the book, as John Lennon says, I can report that although the Benjamin of the film usually acts as though he'd never even seen Playboy, the Benjamin of the novel is not a virgin. Ten pages are devoted to his departure for and return from three weeks on the road, undertaken, after graduation, to relieve his 111etaphysical distress, and he in- forms his father afterward, "There were a few whores included in the tour." Nor IS there any indication that they were Benjamin's first. Just as Nichols has declined to let us know about Benjamin's previous sexual ex- perience, he has left out the trip alto- gether, even though many of it,; inci- dents might have had tremendous cinematic potential. Benjamin tells his father of fighting a forest fire in Shasta country, of hitching rides from comlnon folk, of sex in "a cow pas- D d " . f h . " I ture, a, gOIng on to say 0 tIS, . t was about three in the morning and th ere was ice in the grass and cows walking around us." And he asks, rhetori- cally, "Have you ever had a queer Indian approach you while you're trying to keep your clothes from burning up?" The stuff a Dy Ian song is made of! Yet Nichols omIts the whole diminIshed "Bil- dungsroman, possibly be- cause it so for c e full y underscores the proper problem of "The Gradu- ate;" It shows beyond douht that Ben- jamin is desperately in earnest ahout trying to determine what sort of life he wants to construct for hImself. Bv con- cealing Benjamin's sexual experience from us, Nichols is able to get mileage out of the hoy's naïveté and ineptitude. \\1 e could not laugh in quite the same way if we knew that Benjamin had just returned from sleeping with prosti- tutes on the road; we would have to treat him more seriously. We would have to interpret his reluctance to em- hark upon an affair with Mrs. Rohin- son as more '\ensihle and telling. The virginity question is just one ex- ample of what happens as "The Grad- uate" veers from its earl) course. As soon as Nichols starts fudging on his material, he gets caught up in a web of implausihilities. First, we have the B.M.O.C. Benjamin-evidently head of the debating cluh, campus editor, captaIn of the cross-country team, so- cial chairman of hIS house-trans- formed into a somnamhulistic, clowny schlepp, and, again, into an aggressive tiger. It's natural for a guy to manifest different aspects of his personality with different girls, but the "cool" Ben ja- min.. in shades, who knows his way around tough Sunset Stnp burlesque joints simply cannot be the shook-up fellow with the hig-eyed stare who as- sures Mrs. Robinson as he prepares to grant her fondest wish, "1 want you to know how much I appreciate this." Next, Mrs. Rohinson-a handsome, worldly, unhappily married woman-is transformed first into a businesslike mis- tress and then in to a hellhound Nichols seelns on the verge of making her human in the fight after Benjamin pleads, of their affaÍ1, "Couldn't we liven this up with a little conversa- tion?" For a moment, he allows us to realIze that the young man has the position of strength in a liaison of this kind, and that the older woman-worn out, fearful about wrinkles and flab and her waning capacIty for arousing desire or affection-is the one who is truly vulnerahle. Just as we begin to feel some sym- pathy for this wretched woman, Nichols snaps the witch mask back on her. The relnarkahle thing is that there is not the slight- est necessity for either of these sequences of transfor- mation. Nothing essential to the story requires that Benjamin ever he less than bright and competent. Nor does anything demand Mrs. Robinson's consummate vil- lainy; the wooIng of a girl after an affair with her mother would by it- self present a hero with plenty of oh- stacles-especially once the father- hushand found out. So Nichols has introduced these two distortions of personalIty as though to help captivate us away from our initial focus, and from them spring a litter of false hits. Benjamin would not continue to call Mrs. Rohinson hy her surname after they have been sleeping together for weeks. He would not make such an idiot of himself over retrieving his toothhrush from his car. He would not drive his car literally off the road at